Digital Equipment answers a user's complaint that the year 2000 should not be a leap year.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/decly.htm

by bdfh42 • 18 years ago

73 19 18 years ago

www-users.cs.york.ac.uk

FTA: "Although one can never be sure of what will happen at some future time, there is strong historical precedent for presuming that the present Gregorian calendar will still be in effect by the year 2000. Since we also hope that VMS will still be around by then, we have chosen to adhere to these precedents."

The writer proved remarkably prescient but,alas, Digital Equipment Corporation was not there to greet the new millennium.

thorax• 18 years ago

Poor, DEC! VMS made the trek, though.

rbanffy2• 18 years ago

I remember the day the Compaq takeover was announced.

Oh boy. I knew that day the Alpha was doomed. Pitty... Such a promising achitecture.

Well... Back to my x86... I have work to do.

ken• 18 years ago

"alas, Digital Equipment Corporation was not there to greet the new millennium."

Or even to (February) 2000.

yan• 18 years ago

That sort of response well before Wikipedia is quite impressive!

StrawberryFrog• 18 years ago

"By imperial decree, one year was made 445 days long to bring the calendar back in step with the seasons."

Er, is that right?

Retric• 18 years ago

Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46_BC

ComputerGuru3• 18 years ago

Another interesting tid-bit for the comments:

The year 1582 didn't have Oct. 5th through Oct. 14th (inclusive). They just skipped from the fourth of October to the fifteenth!

dfranke• 18 years ago

Which resulted in widespread violence when landlords tried to make their tenants pay a full month's rent.

m_eiman• 18 years ago

What I'd like to read is the customer's reply to the reply :)

ComputerGuru3• 18 years ago

If that were me, my reply would be to go out and by another DEC :)

mhb• 18 years ago

They knew that a lunation (the time from one full moon to the next) was 29 1/2 days long, so their lunar year had a duration of 364 days. This fell short of the solar year by about 11 days.

Isn't something wrong here?

ComputerGuru3• 18 years ago

Yeah. The lunar year is 351 days, as-is the case with the modern Islamic calendar.

aikiai• 18 years ago

Years divisible by 100 are normally not leap years, UNLESS they are divisible by 400.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year#Algorithm

I knew about the 100, didn't realize the 400 though until I looked into it. The response is comical, but you can understand where the user got confused.

bigthboy• 18 years ago

Well that was certainly entertaining to read... I can only imagine the user on the other end of this being like...=O touche...I also learned about how the calendar came to be because of that! So, another plus.

Does anyone else think its interesting that throughout history there have been numerous... "this isn't working for me, lets just skip some days and it'll be okay!" Heck, this may not even really be there year 2008.

Digital Equipment answers a user's complaint that the year 2000 should not be a leap year.

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